Tag Archives: relationships

This is what happens when I clean.

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I think I’m nesting.

I know, I know…it’s like, a month late. But there was so much going on in my life a month ago. I was commuting for school, so I was at my parents’ house five days a week, and I couldn’t nest there; you know, it not being my home and all. And when I was at my own home, I was so exhausted that I slept, rather than cleaned. Plus, I knew we were moving at the end of the semester, so I rationalized that there was no reason to clean, because we were leaving anyway.

So now that we’re at our new place, I’ve decided I’m going to be Martha Stewart, Claire Dunphy, and Jillian Michaels all rolled into one. Impeccable housekeeper, amazing cook, crafty. Hilarious, crazy, yet wonderful mother. Super driven and fitness-oriented, and in incredible shape. 

I make that promise to myself every time we move (which, thus far in Andy’s and my relationship, has been four times), and I always fail to keep it. But I figure if I get just a little further on that promise every time, I’ll eventually make it.

ANYWAY. My point: I was cleaning today, and I found a plastic storage container that held about 70 pages of stuff I wrote during my junior and senior years of high school.

Not even close to even being half the stuff I wrote during that time, but it’s a start. I’ve been looking for this stuff for about three years.

So I’ve decided to share some of it with all of you. Keep in mind, I was a painfully angsty sixteen- or seventeen-year-old when I wrote these. Actually, I found some stuff I wrote when I was a very morbid thirteen-year-old. Stuff that I refined for years and may eventually share.

Okay, I’ll stop rambling and get to the first story I’ve decided to share.

 

Facing you like this isn’t easy. I’ve been out all night. You never once checked on me. You trusted my judgment and my loyalty.

But you shouldn’t have.

 

I stand before you, shaking, sweating eighty-proof bullets, and telling you lies. I prattle on, rationalizing, for some reason, that if I talk more, you’ll believe more. Bright lights around the room set me ill at ease as I tell you I had fun with my friends. That perhaps I had a little too much to drink, but I came home slowly and carefully, using roads less traveled. Less patrolled.

Do you believe a word I’m telling you?

 

Claiming alcohol-induced fatigue, I opt to sit down, and you sit close to me. I try to steady my breathing and smile, brushing your hair out of your eyes. Those eyes still take my breath away.

My pulse quickens.

 

Don’t I reek of guilt?

Can’t you feel lies in my touch?

Doesn’t infidelity echo in my laugh?

 

How in the world could I do something like this to someone so precious to me?

 

I lay my head back and my stomach churns. Chalking up my nausea to the booze is useless. You speak sweetly and I wonder how you’re not reading it all in my eyes. Eventually your touch hurts my heart too much.

I smell like bad bar food, I tell you, and I need to go shower. Go ahead to bed, sweetheart.

I’ll be there soon.

 

The hot water isn’t enough to melt my frigid heart. My wedding ring remains on my finger. Seeing it makes me furious, and I pound my fist on the wall of the shower, and I immediately regret it, sure I’ve woken you. The tears rolling down my cheeks are hotter than the water I’m trying to boil myself in. They burn thin trails through my skin. The soap doesn’t do the trick the first time around, so I wash myself again, scrubbing until my skin stings.

But you can’t wash a filthy conscience clean in the shower.

 

By the time I come to bed, your breaths are coming slowly and evenly. Your serene face captures my gaze for long moments.

I love you so much.

 

Softly I kiss your warm, tired lips. You don’t even stir.

I cry myself to sleep wondering how I, the demon with the rancid heart, could still be loved by such a beautiful, perfect angel.

Personal Space

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I’m about to share with you more about myself than you probably want to know. But seriously, if you’re not used to that by now, I don’t even know what to tell you.

When I started dancing competitively, around the age of seven, I found out the experience was actually more addicting than crack or meth or Cheetos Puffs. I didn’t care about the medals, the ribbons, or the statues; getting up on that stage, doing what I loved to do more than anything in the world, was reward enough for me (cheesy as that sounds). The behind-the-scenes part was just as good. The nervous, excited tension, the lipstick, hairspray, walking around decked out proudly in our studio’s windbreaker and tear-away pants…it was a drug. Our performing ensemble was energetic, close-knit, fun, and OMG were we so talented.

One staple of the competitive dance world is the art of the “quick-change.” The quick-change is when a dancer has an extremely limited amount of time to change costume/makeup/hair from one dance to her next dance.

When you begin competing, four numbers in between two of your pieces is a quick-change.

When you get to the point of competing and performing so much, you and your group get invited to a dance showcase in Germany (the point my ensemble was at by the time I was 14, and something I will never, ever stop bragging about), four dances is leisurely. You can eat, you can talk, you can almost relax between your dances. A quick-change at that point is one number in between. Two if you’re lucky.

Alright, picture it:

You run off stage from your first number. You have to get back to your dressing room, change your hair from a right-parted low ponytail to a left-parted, ballerina-perfect bun. Your tights have to change from pink to black. You need to change from red lipstick to burgundy. Your costume, of course, will be different, and there’s no telling how complicated it will be to get on. You also need different shoes.

You have to do all this and run backstage to your group and be ready to step on stage in roughly three minutes.

I thrived on quick-changes, both during recitals and at competitions, for YEARS. It was part of the drug that was the entire dance performance experience.

As a result of quick-changes, though, a lot of people saw me and my ensemble sisters naked. I mean, like, A WHOLE LOT. Because, you see, when I say “dressing room,” what I mean is, a banquet room at the Sheraton, where the doors open wide, exposing all within to the outside hallway, every thirty seconds or so, all day long. Those you are forced to share the space with are, thankfully, all female, but chances are, you only know a few of them, as all the other occupants are from different studios, and are, for the day, your enemies.

I’ve had my own mother strip tights off of me while I change my hair and makeup for my next performance. I’ve had friends, mothers of friends, and dance teachers do the same.

Ask any competitive dancer, and she’ll tell you, this is the norm. You know how it’s sort of expected that you’ll lose all sense of modesty when you’re in labor, and about to squeeze a living human out of your loins, and your sister-in-law-to-be gets up in your hoo-ha with a video camera while you’re pushing, but you don’t notice because you’re in too much pain and too emotional to deal with that kind of crap? Same with competitive dancers, minus the video camera in our vaginas, and the live births. We have absolutely zero modesty.

We’ve all seen each other change a thousand times to get our butts back on that stage in less than five minutes, and not a single one of us gives a crap.

And as a result of THAT, we basically had zero personal boundaries. We held hands backstage, waiting to go on, we stood extremely close when we talked to each other, we slapped each other’s hind ends in the hallways, we’d kiss each other’s cheeks to leave big, red lipstick prints we could wear onstage for awards ceremonies, we gave longer-than-normal hugs, we wiped lipstick off each other’s teeth, we fixed each other’s hair and makeup, and, on more occasions than I can remember, we’ve been known to adjust each others’…assets…once in costume. All of this just came with the territory.

For years, I thought I was just totally cool with human contact in general, even outside of dance. Hold my hand for no reason? Why not. Stand next to me with your arm draped over my shoulders for five minutes straight? Sure! Hug every time we see each other? But of course! Slap my butt when you pass me in the hallway (this only applied to girlfriends)? Oh, you’re so silly, I’ll get you next time!

But I’ve been out of the competitive dance game for a few years now, and I’m starting to realize something…

I don’t like being touched anymore. Pretty much ever. At all. I don’t even like sitting or standing very close to people when they talk to me. Sometimes I can’t even make eye contact.

If you want to hold my hand, we’d better be married or about to face our deaths together.

If you want to put your arm around my shoulders, I better have known you for at least a decade, and you better not keep it there for more than fifteen seconds.

If you want a hug every time you see me, it better be because we only see each other once a year or less often. [Note: this, strangely, does not carry over to my dance sisters; I expect a hug every time I see them, and every time I leave their presence.]

If you want to kiss my cheek, you had better be related to me by birth, blood, or marriage. I will likely not kiss you back.

If you want to slap my butt when I walk by, you better be insanely drunk and not know better or married to me. And even the married thing is sometimes pushing it.

I have friends who want to stand close to me, or hold my arm during scary movies, or play with my hair, or just rub my shoulders while they talk to me, and I don’t think I’ve ever said anything before, because I’m a wiener like that and I feel like if I say something about not wanting anyone else’s hands on me, I’ll hurt their feelings.

I tell my own son not to touch my face or my hair. I can’t walk for more than a block or two holding Andy’s hand, and if he starts messing with my hair or touching my neck in public, I dodge him like cracked out cat.

Seriously, am I the only person who just doesn’t like being touched? Am I missing some basic, essential human sensitivity gene that allows me to enjoy contact with other people?

What do you think, guys? Is there something wrong with me? Is there anyone out there who doesn’t like being touched as much as I don’t like it?

And now, my official anthem.

You can’t be in our club!

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I was an incredible dork in elementary school. If you watch Modern Family, I was like Alex.

I was a brown-noser, a district spelling bee champ, a “gifted student”…I was amazingly cool.

I had a fairly steady, small group of friends throughout elementary school. One of the things I remember most about that era is that we were always trying to start “clubs.”

Do you remember those days?

When you and your friends were so cool that you knew you deserved an exclusive meeting place, and membership cards, and t-shirts, and you should probably make up your own language because the matters you and your fellow club members would be discussing were so important, you’d be bugged or end up with a mole or something.

Don’t even lie, you remember those days.

My friends and I staked out one piece of playground equipment and claimed it for our “club.” I don’t remember what we talked about or what we did, but I remember we were all about exclusivity.

I mean, not that anyone really wanted to join. I don’t think we ever had to tell anyone to get lost or that they couldn’t be a part of our club, but if anyone had asked, we probably would have said no. Unless they asked really nicely, or were cooler than us. Which was true of just about everyone at that point in my life.

So I thought that as we grew older and learned about equality and acceptance and political correctness (okay, granted, I pretty much ignore that last one), blah, blah, blah, we left that kind of thinking behind.

About a week ago, however, I was shown there are at least half a dozen people who missed that memo.

I hate Facebook fights. They’re dumb. They’re absolutely useless. They’re usually about something ideology-related, and nobody’s belief system is going to be overhauled by an internet debate.

At least mine never will be.

So I got added to one of those “secret,” invitation-only Facebook groups. It doesn’t matter which one it was, but I will say it was a parenting group, and it was a group promoting a very specific parenting style.

I made the awful, horrible, no good, very bad decision to ask what the term that they used for their parenting style meant.

And then the internet exploded.

I was suddenly being interrogated; why was I a part of this group when I didn’t know what the term meant? Who had added me? Why did I feel I had the right to participate in their discussions?

Let me stop right here, because I had been joining in their discussions for days, and everyone seemed to enjoy what I was saying. I actually fit right in with their group.

Was I trying to infiltrate their group to take screen shots of their discussions, so that I could then paste them on my own parenting page, where everyone holds the exact opposite ideals as this page, and then everyone on my own page can just trash everyone on this page and call them names and internet-punish them?

Again, stopping, because you don’t even want to know what traumatic incident in their past they were referring to. Also, let’s PLEASE be real about this: what can someone who you have never met (and likely never will) do to punish you over the internet. Seriously.

Why was I using “such a tone”?

Stopping ONE MORE TIME, because it’s the internet, and unless you’re a wizard, you don’t know my tone of voice; you can only infer it. And FOR THE RECORD, I was being totally calm and even-tempered, even though I was being insulted by at least six of their 95 members, literally every thirty seconds or less, FOR AN HOUR AND A HALF. They also claimed, in their “About,” to be nonjudgmental, supportive, and fun-loving.

Why was I being so passive-aggressive with my smiley faces?

WITH MY SMILEY FACES, YOU GUYS.

Over and over, I heard the same things.

I told them, Hey guys, I don’t mean any harm. Seriously. Check me out with [person who added me], I’m chill. I believe the same things as you guys. Check out Silky Mamas; I’m an admin there, and our basic philosophy is very similar to yours.

And then I got yelled at for “whoring out my own page” (which I wasn’t, and it’s not even my page; I was super excited to be added as one of six administrators about ten weeks ago).

My favorite part, though, was when I was told that I should feel “incredibly honored” that I was even invited to join such a private group, full of such sensitive information and such personal stories.

And suddenly, I was eight years old again. I was never told I couldn’t be in anyone’s club (of course, I never told anyone they couldn’t be in my club, either), but I figured this was probably what it was like.

I may or may not have made a mildly rude remark about how anyone with the desire to do so could just make a page for a private group and only invite and/or add the people they chose, and that I had been added out of nowhere, asked a simple question, and then treated like garbage by women who prided themselves on being “supportive and nonjudgmental.”

I was promptly removed from the group. Ahem.

Occasionally, I find that the more I interact with the general public on social media, the less I want to interact with the general public on social media.

For the record, you’re all invited to be in my club. We’ll make t-shirts and come up with cool, slightly offensive sayings to write on them in glitter glue.

I would never vote for Santorum, but…

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[TOTALLY DRAMATIC opening statement about my political and ethical views (LOTS) and technical political knowledge (very little)]

Santorum is getting an epic amount of crap lately. From liberals to conservatives to libertarians (<- like Meredith. Read her Santorum post. It’s perfect.), to people who just want to laugh at the Urban Dictionary definition of his last name (look it up if you want to – I’m not linking it because it is ABSOLUTELY NSFW)…the guy can’t escape it.

I’ve been trying to pay much more attention to this election than any election in the past. Partly because, hey, I can vote now (second presidential election in my life where that has been the case), but mostly because in recent months, I’ve learned that I really, surprisingly do care about politics, and there’s definitely an activist inside me trying to escape into the light of day. Something high school Kristen would have absolutely hated about twenty-one-year-old Kristen, but high school Kristen can go suck an egg.

Anyway, yes, paying attention more, digressing less. No, actually, more digression, but maybe it’ll make a dry subject more interesting.

I follow a lot about Ron Paul (the candidate of choice for most people I know), and I know some basics about Gingrich (who I equate to a slug in my mind…for the slimy reasons, not the slow-moving ones), Romney (way-right-wing, and Mormon, right?), and Santorum (extremely unfortunate last name, way-right-wing, OMGHOLYCATHOLOCISM ideals).

My thoughts on Santorum are in the comments on Meredith’s post (linked above), but I’ll sort of re-state them for the point I’ll eventually make here:

You would probably be surprised how much I am in favor of “traditional” roles of women in relation to men…to an extent. I would like to think that in most career situations, I’m absolutely not sexist. I see an attorney first, a woman second. A barista first, a man second. A CEO first, a woman second. And so on, and so forth. Of course, that’s not always the case (I’m in the nursing field…seeing male RNs on a daily basis is still going to take some getting used to), but I try not to let a person’s sex influence what job I believe they should have.

Santorum’s view on women in the military seems pretty degrading, I’ll admit. He implies that our emotions get too involved on the front lines of combat, and that men would, in many cases, compromise the given objective to defend their sisters in arms (is that politically correct? Whatever, I don’t really care.), AND that we are, by and large, not as physically capable as men in front line combat situations.

Infuriating, right?

I’m all for equality in the workplace, but I’m going to break this down and be totally honest and vulnerable and crap with you guys. Because what better place than on the World Wide Web, where literally ANYONE ON PLANET EARTH with a computer can see it?

I would not last in combat. I AM weaker than the men who are fighting in Afghanistan right now. Of course, I am also weaker than the women who are fighting there.

My emotions WOULD get in the way of the mission. If one of my comrades made fun of the way I tied my boots that morning, and I happened to be PMS-ing, and we were in stealth mode, trying to sneak up on some insurgents (I know, my military lingo is totally on point), I would probably start crying. Loudly. I would yell, “Well you know what, HARRISON!? Your head is shaved totally lopsided, and your breath has been killing me for MILES, and your girlfriend back home is UGLY and I’m sick of seeing pictures of her!”

I would give away our location. We would all die. And the giving away of our position would have something to do with it, but mostly, it would be because they just wanted me to shut up (my voice has a tendency to get obnoxiously high-pitched when I’m upset).

Also, I’m weak. I am five-foot-two, and I’m barely over one hundred pounds. I am nothing to be feared.

Also, I’m a huge baby, and if my boots gave me a blister, I’d ask to be choppered right the heck on out of there. I’d probably sit and pout and whine until it happened.

Switching gears a smidge now.

Andy and I have been watching (and when I say Andy and I, I mean that Andy sits on the couch and watches eight episodes at a time, while I chase Logan around and yell at him to stop chasing our new cat around [yes, I got a cat, details later] and pay very little attention to what is happening in the show) this show on the Discovery channel called The Colony. Here’s Wikipedia’s synopsis of the show:

The Colony is a reality television series that is produced by the Discovery Channel. The program follows a group of people who might survive in a post-apocalyptic environment.

Casting was done by Metal Flowers. For the first season they found 10 volunteers who had useful survival skills, as well as almost 100 actors to do scripted and improvisational work for the show.[1]

I didn’t think I’d like it at first, but now I’m totally sucked into this world of voyeuristic, simulated-post-apocalyptic entertainment. Watch seasons 1 and 2. They’re awesome.

In season two, a new character gets introduced around the forty-day mark. He’s a HIGHLY trained former Marine sniper, who then went on to do high-profile security in the Middle East (didn’t catch where, sorry), and basically his resume will blow your mind. This guy is a bona fide bad ass.

At one point in the episode I’m watching, the colonists are preparing for a confrontation with a group of “outsiders” they’ve recently spotted. Tick (the Marine) takes the lead on the situation, designating which colonist gets stationed where (in terms of compound security), according to his or her specific skill set or strengths.

This is where my two seemingly unrelated trains of thought crash violently.

Santorum states women are physically weaker than men in combat. That our emotions get in the way. That men have a primal instinct to protect us. And I’ll admit, I like feeling rough and tough and bad ass sometimes…but at the end of the day, I want my husband to fight for me and protect me, AND I want to be allowed my emotions.

I can see where that rubs some people the wrong way. Especially the way he said it. He says a LOT of things that are belittling to women.

PLEASE KNOW that I would never vote for Santorum. I do not like him, Sam I am. I even said that if it came down to anyone BUT Ron Paul vs. Obama, I’ll vote for Obama. Period.

HOWEVER.

This is what a MARINE said, after he chose to put one man and one woman at the same “post” together on The Colony:

For negotiators, we’re going to have Reno and Sian.

Reno is a young, totally ripped construction foreman. Sian is a teacher. And a woman. Aside, in a private interview with the camera guys, Tick says:

I want Reno to feel like he’s the most important person on the ground. He can handle all the talking and the negotiation with Sian. We need a woman on the negotiation team to de-escalate situations, soon. It makes everything a little softer. It’ll keep Reno kind of at bay. If you keep a woman next to him, he’s going to be more defensive, and stay back.

This is from a Marine sniper, guys. He understands that this is the primal instinct of men: to be protective over women.

I’m not saying it’s not TOTALLY different in combat situations. Obviously, I have NO IDEA what that’s like. I’m not saying Santorum was right, or that he wasn’t totally tactless or demeaning (because he TOTALLY was, and it was gross). I’m not saying I agree with anything else he supports (although there may be some issues I’m on his side for, but very few, and very conditionally).

I agree with the Marine. I completely agree with the Marine. Not Santorum. The Marine. But their points definitely collide.

So…let’s all calm down a little, shall we? He may not be the person we want running our country (I sure as hell don’t want him running it), but he’s not Satan.